In a scene familiar in the Indian context, a conflict of interests took place between cricket and cinema. Cinema won as the competition merged into companionship. What came out of the argument was Galatta.com, as the former excels in the Web design and development space, Girish Ramdas and C R Venkatesh thought it to be a sensible decision because in 2000, when Galatta was established, there were cricket portals available but not many movie portals.

The ‘complete movie portal’ offers news, interviews, trailers, wallpapers, music, and everything imaginable from the world of movies in seven languages - Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Hindi, English, and Bhojpuri. Though it is most likely that general search engines are used to find information on films, Girish Ramdas, President of Galatta says close to 30,000 people visit Galatta as the next step every day via search engines alone. Girish feels that the movie portals catering exclusively to one particular language have the disadvantage of missing out on what the same actors are doing in other languages, as largely there is an overlap of artists, especially so in the South Indian film industries. Galatta, he opines, gives a fuller perspective due to the large number of languages covered in the portal.

Movies have the capacity of attracting all age groups, but the average Galatta visitor belongs to the age group of 18 to 30 years, is computer literate, and is more often than not an urban English speaking youth. Girish points out to a major shift in its 30 lakh user base, as earlier 70 percent of Galatta visitors used to be NRIs and the remaining 30 percent resident Indians. But now the trend has reversed as more and more Indians are feeding their appetite for films through the Web.

Galatta has also ventured into net mobile services as the company sensed the opportunity in that area with the introduction of 3G services in India. Girish rightly spots the business prospect in this field when he says, “On the Internet everything is free, whereas on the mobile, everything is paid.” 70 percent of Galatta.com’s revenue is through advertisements and the rest is through content, movies, and downloads. Galatta is involved in image management on the Web for some of the biggest stars in the industry like Madhavan and Asin. They are also the net partners of big budget movies like Sivaji and Asal.

Speaking about the major challenges Galatta faces, Girish names piracy as the toughest. However, efforts are being made to tackle this menace by a collaboration of movie producers’ council, net service providers, respective governments, and the police by facilitating lodging immediate complaints against pirates and removing URLs of pirated sites. It is also true that information flows faster by word of mouth and interactions through social networking sites, thus posing as a competitor to sites like Galatta.